ATTACK
OF THE GREED-HEADSUsing Iraqi oil as a "bargaining
chip"  the War Party goes commercial

No
wonder all those crunchy-granola kids hate capitalism, or
think they do. Getta
loada this from today's [September 15] Washington Post:

"Although
senior Bush administration officials say they have not begun
to focus on the issues involving oil and Iraq, American and
foreign oil companies have already begun maneuvering for a
stake in the country's huge proven reserves of 112 billion
barrels of crude oil, the largest in the world outside Saudi
Arabia."

Oh,
they just can't wait to get their greedy little hands
on all that oil, can they? Undeterred by even a modicum of
decorum or subtlety, these pigs can hardly restrain themselves
from smacking their fat greasy lips as Dubya revs up his death
machine. Has a more unappetizing display of pure evil ever
displayed itself so shamelessly? Tens of thousands of casualties,
billions in tax dollars, an economic
shock that could send the U.S. economy into a tailspin
 and for what? So that Big Oil can reap what the Post
refers to as a "bonanza." A U.S. invasion, we are
told, would succeed in "scuttling oil deals" between
Baghdad and Russia, France and other countries. The competitive
advantages of this war openly touted by that tireless warmonger,
former CIA director R. James Woolsey:

"France
and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They
should be told that if they are of assistance
in moving Iraq toward decent government, we'll do the best
we can to ensure that the new government and American companies
work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam,
it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade
the new Iraqi government to work with them."

This
is the real meaning of "multilateralism"  it's
the equivalent of an international mugging. If you guys help
me jump that Iraqi dude, we can divvy up the loot. It used
to be that U.S. policymakers tried to mask their mercenary
motives behind invocations of universal "human rights"
and the worldwide spread of "democracy." Now they
flaunt their avarice, as if it were a virtue. It's enough
to raise the rotten corpse of Marxism from the grave, and
give Bin Laden a propaganda boost.

Capitalism,
naturally, will take the blame. It doesn't matter that this
isn't free market economics, but mercantilism, a kind of crony
capitalism with claws. The enemies of the market  the Bin
Ladens and the Marxists  will cry, "See! I told you
so!" As the U.S. holds up the prospect of loot as a lure
to our allies, promising to cut them in on the deal, who
besides the amoral Larry Kudlow can help but turn away
in revulsion at the sight of these vultures? Circling over
the not-yet-dead corpses of uncounted Iraqis and God-knows-how-many
American soldiers, these ghouls are already drooling over
the prospect of a delicious meal of blood and bone.

If,
after reading Woolsey's comments, any of you want to go take
a shower, then I'll just wait right here .

Back
so soon? Hey, I hate to send you back to the showers again,
but this little snippet from the Post aticle
is going to make you feel filthier than ever:

"Representatives
of many foreign oil concerns have been meeting with leaders
of the Iraqi opposition to make their case for a future stake
and to sound them out about their intentions."

The
U.S.-funded Iraqi "opposition" has already put their
country up for sale, and is busy taking bids. While the Iraqi
government is prevented from making any deals with competing
oil companies in France, China, and elsewhere, the Iraqi
National Congress is conducting its own auction:

"'We
will review all these agreements, definitely,' said Faisal
Qaragholi, a petroleum engineer who directs the London office
of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an umbrella organization
of opposition groups that is backed by the United States .
Ahmed Chalabi, the INC leader, went even further, saying he
favored the creation of a U.S.-led consortium to develop Iraq's
oil fields, which have deteriorated under more than a decade
of sanctions. 'American companies will have a big shot at
Iraqi oil,' Chalabi said."

Still
under indictment in Jordan for embezzlement, Chalabi is
the perfect embodiment of the new corruption U.S. policymakers
envision taking hold in a post-invasion Middle East. In 1987,
Chalabi hightailed it out of Jordan with millions stolen from
Petra Bank, in which he had a controlling interest. He was
tried
in absentia, convicted, and slapped with a $46 million
fine. Chalabi, for his part, denies the allegations, and ascribes
his court conviction to Jordan's King Hussein, the pro-American
Hashemite monarch, whom he claims is really a secret
ally of Saddam Hussein. Uh huh. So I guess this means the
Swiss government is also in Saddam's camp, since
they acted before the Jordanians in seizing Chalabi's ill-gotten
gains.

The
crook Chalabi has been playing fast and loose with your tax
dollars, too. According to this New York Timesaccount,
the U.S. is holding its nose as it holds up the INC as the
future of Iraqi "democracy":

"The
CIA, which played a major role in backing the INC from 1992
to 1996 when they both had headquarters in northern Iraq,
has ongoing questions about how tens of millions of dollars
in earlier funding were used, according to former intelligence
agents who worked with the group . 'There's still a black
cloud over the INC because of the black hole that money seemed
to go into,' a former intelligence official said. Because
of past disputes over funds, as well as tactics and goals,
the U.S. intelligence community is now loath to get involved
with the group, he added."

The
gang rape of Iraq is proceeding on schedule, with oil rights
being used as "bargaining chips" to keep the other
big powers (especially Russia and China) in line. The oil
companies themselves can afford to be relatively discrete,
since brazen rapists like Woolsey are willing to say openly
what the corporate suits will only admit to "on background":

"Officials
of several major firms said they were taking care to avoiding
playing any role in the debate in Washington over how to proceed
on Iraq. 'There's no real upside for American oil companies
to take a very aggressive stance at this stage. There'll be
plenty of time in the future,' said James Lucier, an oil analyst
with Prudential Securities. But with the end of sanctions
that likely would come with Hussein's ouster, companies such
as ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco would almost assuredly play
a role, industry officials said."

Stephen
Schwartz's most recent upchuck has been splattered all
over the pages of Frontpagemag.com, the online magazine run
by red diaper baby turned rightwing caricature David
Horowitz. For those who don't know, Schwartz is an ex-Trotskyist-turned-
neocon-turned-Muslim
turned vehement anti-Muslim, fired from his position
at the Voice of America for
being a wacko. In a rambling polemic posted last Friday,
Schwartz claims that events have vindicated his fulsome support
for the Kosovo war, even as his Kosovar Albanian heroes ethnically
cleanse the last Serbs from the former Yugoslav province.
But the world just isn't ready for his perfect wisdom:

"Strangely,
some of the same windbags and wiseacres who leapt to deny
the existence of a serious crisis in Yugoslavia now wish to
divert U.S. attention from Saudi reality  and to halt U.S.
pressure on Iraq."

Included
among this number are Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft,
whom Schwartz describes as members of "the Belgrade mafia"  as
if by talking to a foreign ruler, U.S. diplomats somehow
acquire, by osmosis, the characteristics of their interlocutors.
By this standard, the U.S. would maintain diplomatic relations
with very few nations outside the West. But Schwartz is uninterested
in such boring realities. His chief interest is in his rich
fantasy life, much of which seems directed at trying to smear
little old me:

"And
of course, the 'Slobophile Heil' corner of the sewer, inhabited
by lowlifes ranging from the Mickey Maoists of the International
Action Center to neofascists a la Justin Raimondo, are still
cheering for Slobo and Saddam alike. The most disreputable
Jew-baiters among these repellent rodents have assailed David
Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, and myself as ex-leftists who have
supposedly become warmongers. But these parasites seem not
to notice the logical disconnect: we were leftists decades
ago, and have made up for our errors by fighting against dictatorships."

Instead
of doing penance for his "errors,' Schwartz merely compounds
them. After all these years, "ex-"-leftists like
the
former Comrade Sandalio are still screeching "fascist!"
at their opponents, and making a spectacle out of themselves.
Certainly
the readers of Frontpage thought so  without any prompting
from me, I might add. With his leftist instinct for the victimological
main chance, Schwartz whines that I'm "Jew-baiting"
him  but how does one "Jew-bait" a self-proclaimed
Muslim? Or has the
deluded fantasist who called himself "Suleyman Ahmad"
undergone yet another miraculous conversion? What is it this
time  Scientology? The Unification Church? A sex-change operation?

The
idea that I "cheered
for Slobo" or in any way impugned the
integrity of Ronald Radosh is rubbish to anyone capable
of following a link. But Schwartz is not content to just lie
 he has to act out his perverted obsessions in public and
in print. He once wrote me a poison pen letter that referred
to "feces running down your mouth" (is this an ancient
Bosnian epithet?) and his weird coprophilic
fixation kicks in here, too:

"Our
'critics' are in bed with the skank left now, and actively
defend dictatorships. If Raimondo  who not long ago expressed
his regret that Japan lost the second world war  is ready
to die for anyone, it's for Slobo and Saddam, alongside the
'white separatist' trash and the idolaters of Kim Il-sung.
Welcome to the show: the Hitler-Stalin Pact, 60 years after.
As the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret reminded
us in that context: dried blood turns from red to brown, the
color of feces."

Never
mind the "skank left"  take a gander at the toilet-mouth
right! It takes the mind of a surrealist to comprehend what
motivates this humorless nutball with a painfully obvious
anal fixation. Babbling about white separatism and dying for
Saddam  say what?  the man is all too obviously
a raving lunatic! How he can pull a "neo-fascist"
out of a libertarian
hat is a mystery to any rational person, but then reason
was never the voluble Schwartz's strong suit. Neither is humor.
The
irony of my remark that, but for an accident of history,
American youth might now be studying the intricate beauties
of flower-arranging and the Japanese tea ceremony instead
of the pretentious profanities of Eminem, is naturally lost
on a hateful narrow-minded ideologue of Schwartz's ilk.

With
the publication of his new book, The Two Faces of Islam,
Schwartz is in line to become the War Party's resident "expert"
on Wahabism-as-evil-incarnate, but his complete lack of credibility
may turn out to be a problem. If he ever writes an autobiography,
a good title would be The Three (or Four) Faces of Stephen
Schwartz, for this is the same Muslim warrior who
once declared:

"We
Muslims know that Allah permits us to take up the sword. We
know that Allah permits us to fight the Jihad. That Allah
permits us to fight the Jihad in Allah's way...As it says
in the Quran: 'Never say of those who have died in Allah's
way that they are not with us. They are with us even though
you cannot see them."

Oh,
we can see them alright  every time we contemplate
that big hole in the ground of lower Manhattan. Perhaps Schwartz's
devotion to the cause of jihad in Bosnia and Kosovo
is another one of those "errors" he was telling
us about, although I doubt he has the objectivity to admit
it. But if he thinks that sliming me somehow makes up for
allying himself with the
spiritual and military allies of Osama Bin Laden, then
his fez is on too tight.

Boy-oh-boy,
it really is getting plug-ugly out there  check out
this
insufferably snide piece in the New York Times
on the new magazine, The American Conservative, co-edited
by Pat Buchanan, sometime Antiwar.com columnist Scott McConnell,
and Taki Theodoracopulos, the delightfully blithe spirit who
writes for the [British] Spectator, and the New
York Press, the Big Apple's most readable alternative
paper. Describing Buchanan on the set of his new show with
Bill Press, Times writer David Carr avers that Pat
"shows a bit of fang while the camera is rolling, but
it is shtick. His real enmity is reserved for his fellow conservatives."

And
what's so wrong with that? After all, the enmity of some of
his fellow conservatives has always been reserved for him.
It was the two Bills of neocon-dom, Bennett and Kristol, who
launched a vicious smear campaign against Buchanan, branding
him a "fascist" (is it me, or has this overused
epithet completely lost its meaning?). Carr would seem to
concur, at least by implication, as he recites the full litany
of Buchanan's sins against political correctness:

"Mr.
Buchanan once called Martin Luther King Jr. 'immoral, evil
and a demagogue,' described Congress as 'Israeli-occupied
territory' and has suggested that gays are 'Hell-bent on Satanism
and suicide.' His rhetoric has moderated somewhat over three
runs for the presidency, but Mr. Buchanan still marches to
his own martial music."

Martin
Luther King was no saint, and no one disputes that Congress
is a pushover for the powerful Israeli lobby. But what I want
to know is how Pat found out about my Satanic practices (aside
from what appears in this column, that is). Gee, and to think
that he still let me make the first nominating
speech on his behalf at the Reform Party's infamous Long
Beach convention. What a guy! I guess he just wanted to make
me feel special right before my scheduled suicide. Oh well,
what are friends for?

God,
but this piece reminded me of how narrowly parochial
the New York Times can be, in spite of its vaunted
internationalism, like an episode of Seinfeld seen for the
tenth time. It may seem unfair that Carr only cited the most
well-known of Pat's enemies, but indeed it seems he just consulted
the conservatives down the block, the closest representatives
of what is a rare  and rarified  species in New York
City and environs. No wonder he came up with Bill Kristol
and (guffaw!) Lucianne
Goldberg. The former was particularly nasty, no doubt
setting the tone for the barrage of Schwartzian invective
to come:

"William
Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, says he believes that
the inclusion of Mr. Theodoracopulos is a mistake. 'I am all
for another magazine, but I think that the inclusion of Taki,
who is a pretty loathsome character, will hurt their credibility,'
he says."

For
the faithless opportunist Kristol, who once touted Colin Powell
for President and now vilifies him as an "appeaser,"
to call anyone "loathsome" is certainly a case of
pot-kettle-black. That this is said by someone whose boss
is Rupert Murdoch, a media tycoon who has elevated
the principle of the lowest-common-denominator to a high art-form,
is what they call New York nerve. No doubt Kristol and Co.
plan on playing the ethnic victimology game, echoing the charge
of the fanatically pro-Israel Lord Conrad Black (and publisher
of the Spectator) that Taki's critique of Israel, expressed
with his characteristic verve, is evidence of ethnic bigotry.
Kristol and his friends (rightly) condemn Jesse Jackson when
he tries to pull this kind of crap, but they play the same
game very well themselves.

Speaking
of New York verve (or is that nerve?), I can hardly believe
Carr dragged out Lucianne Goldberg, whose 15 minutes of fame
has long since faded, along with the greasy
stains on an old blue dress. He naturally doesn't mention
that Mama Goldberg's little boy, Jonah, is the Online Editor
of National Review, TAC's chief competition.
In any event, La Goldberg is quoted as follows:

"Amongst
a certain group, Pat can do no wrong. He could appear nude,
with Gloria Steinem with his hair on fire, and they would
still love him."

Ya
gotta love her  what imagery! But then she goes fuzzy, as
if the downers have suddenly kicked in:

"'Still,'
she says, 'We have reached critical mass with giving our opinions.
I mean, how big is the conservative sponge?'"

Apparently,
only as big as Lucy wants it to be. I'll leave it to my readers
to figure out the significance of the sponge metaphor: perhaps
an arcane pop culture reference to Spongebob
Sqaurepants? For a long time Lucianne's website featured
a photo that showed her wielding a long cigarette
holder, a feather boa draped over her shoulder. I always
wondered what it was she was smoking, and now I know .

Taki
is right about Kristol's motivation: "Apparently, they're
very worried about us." The utter dishonesty of Kristol's
remarks shows just how frightened this little troll is that
he'll, at last, have some real competition in the business
of conservative factionalism. Carr quotes him as saying:

"Regardless
of who is involved, Mr. Kristol is not sure that there is
a big market in being a scold of the right. 'I think it is
important for a magazine, any magazine, to try to say interesting
things about the world,' Mr. Kristol says. 'I think a magazine
would make a big mistake in saying that 'Our topic is another
magazine.'"

If
there is no market in being a "scold of the right,"
then certainly Kristol ought to know. It's only natural for
a self-promoter of his sort to say that it's all about him.
But for Carr to fall for this line that Buchanan's target
is not a set of wrong ideas but a magazine is just too pat
to be believed. The neoconservative tendency in American politics
is far broader than the editorial board of The Weekly Standard,
as any dolt can tell you. TAC's real competition, in terms
of winning the circulation wars, is not Kristol's subsidized
rag but National Review  a magazine long past its
prime, and boring too boot, with a restless base of readers
ready to bolt.

If
you need a reason to subscribe to The American Conservative,
then what about giving Bill Kristol heartburn? Now there's
a worthy cause! Or how about the following:

"'We
need to recapture the conservative movement,' [Buchanan] says,
scrolling through the Drudge Report in his office at NBC in
Washington after a taping session in late August. 'The movement
has been hijacked and turned into a globalist, interventionist,
open-borders ideology, which is not the conservative movement
I grew up with.'"

You
don't have to be a conservative (or, in my case, a libertarian
with reactionary not to mention Satantic tendencies) to think
that TAC is going to make the foreign policy debate
a lot
more interesting. Sign up to be a Charter Subscriber and
get a discount good only until September 30. All the right
people already hate it, and I just know TAC is going
to be fun .